We woke up early on Thursday and drove down to the coast, turning south towards La Trinité. We parked at the Plage des Raisiniers and strolled along the sand. It was already hot, the water was doing that Caribbean colour thing, and a group of seniors were doing an aquarobics class, which gave us confidence that it would be a fine place to swim. So we did, and it was excellent.
Sandy yet refreshed, we drove to the tip of the Presqu'Île de la Caravelle peninsula, past the end of the paved road and onto a pitted gravel path that made us grateful for the previously-described high clearance of our Dacia Duster. We eventually found the ruins of Château Dubuc, an 18th century colonial sugar plantation that ran right down to the mangrove swamp at the water. We learned about the brutal history of the island, in which successive indigenous groups fought each other before eventually being colonized by the French, who then spent a couple of hundred years fighting off the British, the Dutch, and slave rebellions. We also saw crazy walls built with coral bricks, avoided some kind of poisonous tree, and got pretty hot.
We stopped for lunch at a place we'd noticed earlier in the drive thanks to the clouds billowing out of its bbq -- smoked sausages, fire-grilled chicken, and rice with a Creole sauce. The rice and sauce were great, but the chicken was the star of the show.
That evening we wandered around the neighbourhood of our airbnb -- more winding little roads, yards and buildings in some disarray, birds, lizards, flowers, chickens and goats and cows and some kind of weird-looking turkey ducks. At night, some rain rolled in and rumbled loudly against our roof for a few minutes before skulking off into the nearby hills.
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